Products · PAE

Stop talking IPs. Start talking business.

PAE is the Rosetta Stone between your business and your security architecture. Cryptic firewall rules become plain-language business approvals.

PAE is the automation engine of the AE+PAE management layer. It translates raw flows into the names your business owners already use, then pushes policy to every enforcement point. Approvals happen at the speed of the question.

Schedule a demoHow it works
PAE · liveBTA · v1.0
Rosetta Stone workflow8w → 4d
  1. 01
    Discover
    10.5.10.12 :1433 → 10.20.30.5
  2. 02
    Enrich
    BillingPortal-Prod → Customer-PII
  3. 03
    Ask
    Owner attests business intent
  4. 04
    Enforce
    Policy pushed to all enforcement points
Audit-grade by default✓
How it works

From cryptic flows to business intent.

Five steps that turn an audit-week into an audit-hour and an approval-month into an approval-day.

  • 01

    Discover the technical truth

    PAE connects to your visibility tools and captures the ground truth of every flow across applications, workloads, and environments.

    • Multi-vendor
    • Hybrid + cloud
    • No agent rip-and-replace
  • 02

    Enrich with business context

    Cryptic IPs and ports map to the human-readable names your CMDB or tagging system already uses. 10.5.10.12 becomes BillingPortal-Prod. tcp/1433 becomes Customer-PII.

    • CMDB-aware
    • Ownership tags
    • Data classification
  • 03

    Ask in plain English

    PAE auto-generates a workflow your business owner can read: "BillingPortal-Prod is requesting access to Customer-PII. Is this required for its business function?"

    • Plain-language workflows
    • Owner attestation
    • Audit trail by default
  • 04

    Enforce business intent

    When the owner clicks Attest, PAE turns that single decision into hierarchical policies and deploys them to every enforcement point, from the data-center firewall to the eBPF agent on the workload. Naming conventions get enforced at authoring time, so the human-error class that hits during 11pm change windows disappears.

    • Reversible cutovers
    • Multi-point enforcement
    • Naming conventions enforced at authoring
  • 05

    Archive every state, continuously

    Every change captured, every prior state preserved. Audit prep stops being a fire drill. The evidence pack is already there, generated as a byproduct of how policy gets shipped, not as an annual retro-fit.

    • Continuous archive
    • Pre-built evidence packages
Policy flow

From app intent to every enforcement point.

PAE sits between the source of truth — your application dependency map — and the firewalls, segmentation engines, and access controls that enforce policy. One intent, expressed once, applied everywhere.

PAE · Policy FlowIntent → Enforcement
PDPLIVEApplicationDependency MapDECISION POINTPAEPOLICY AUTOMATIONPEP·01Perimeter FirewallPEP·02NetworkPEP·03Macro-SegPEP·04Micro-SegSOURCE OF TRUTHINTENT → POLICYENFORCED EVERYWHERE
  • PDP · Policy Decision Point

    Application Dependency Mapping

    Source of truth. Discovers how applications actually talk to each other, so policy expresses real business intent — not stale IP-range guesses.

  • PAE · Policy Automation Engine

    Intent translated, once.

    Takes business intent — “Finance can talk to ERP, nothing else does” — and translates it into rules for every enforcement point. Policy review becomes a business conversation, not an IP audit.

  • PEP · Policy Enforcement Point

    Enforced at every layer.

    PAE pushes consistent policy to the perimeter firewall, the network, macro-segmentation, and micro-segmentation — so one change does not leave four configurations drifting apart.

Case study

Real Policy Automation Engine work, in the field.

A representative engagement showing how BTA scopes, deploys, and hands off.

Case study
Financial Services
Global financial organization
  • Cisco Secure Workload
  • Zero Trust
  • Micro-segmentation

Zero Trust micro-segmentation during an IT migration.

A global financial organization stood up Zero Trust and micro-segmentation during a major migration, using Cisco Secure Workload as the enforcement plane and PAE to keep policy aligned to business intent. Compliance posture improved by 70%, with audit-grade trails by default.

  • 70%
    Compliance posture improvement
  • 100%
    Audit-grade attestation coverage
  • 0
    Production incidents during cutover
Read the case study
From the field

Stop living in ClickOps.Your team is paying for every additional console.

A unified management layer for security policy, across every enforcement platform. Anchored to what you already pay.

Every additional enforcement platform compounds the per-console labor and the human-error class that comes with it. A typical 500-agent environment loses roughly half an FTE every year on policy maintenance alone.

  • 01

    Console hopping

    CSW. ACI. Panorama. FMC. Cloud. ServiceNow. Each console has its own UI, its own report formats, its own gaps. Your team jumps screens to answer a single question.

  • 02

    Conventions break under pressure

    Five clicks deep into ACI at 11:55pm, conventions get dropped to ship the change. The audit finds it months later. The remediation cycle begins.

  • 03

    The truth gets buried

    Native consoles bury drops and rejects three menus deep. Each investigation costs 30+ minutes of clicking. Multiply that by every alert your team triages this week.

The platform

One management layer.Every Policy Enforcement Point. Every stakeholder.

Architect Explorer and the Policy Automation Engine, working together. Pluggable enforcement platforms, one model of policy, one surface every stakeholder can read.

Built for everyone who reads policy

Not just those who configure it.

  • Application Owners
  • Risk & Policy
  • Audit
  • SecOps
  • Network Engineering
AE/PAE · PlatformPluggable PEPs
AE/PAECSWACIPanoramaFMCCloudServiceNowPLUGGABLE PEPS · ONE PANE · ONE MODEL OF POLICY
  • 01

    Cross-platform visibility and reporting

    One report for permits, denies, drift, and orphans across every PEP. Stop reconciling five console exports before audit cycles.

  • 02

    Direct policy push

    Author once in AE. Push to Cisco Secure Workload, ACI EPGs, Panorama, or FMC. No more clicking through five screens to ship a change.

  • 03

    Continuous policy archive

    Every change captured. Every prior state preserved. Audit prep stops being a fire drill. The evidence pack is already there.

  • 04

    Naming conventions enforced at authoring

    The human-error class that hits during 11pm change windows disappears. The convention you set is the convention that ships.

What changes

Four ways your team wins.

Operations, governance, compliance, and risk. Same direction at the same time.

  • Operations

    ClickOps reduction

    Consolidated reporting replaces console-hopping. Direct push from AE replaces clicking through five screens to ship one change.

    10×
    Fewer clicks for routine policy work
  • Governance

    Review without the consoles

    Application Owners, Risk, and Policy teams read policy like a business document. No one has to learn CSW, ACI, or Panorama interfaces to approve a change.

    75%
    Less time per policy review cycle
  • Compliance

    Audit preparedness

    Continuous archive plus pre-built evidence packages. Findings that originate as ClickOps errors stop showing up in the first place.

    60%
    Less audit-prep time per cycle
  • Risk

    Risk reduction

    Naming conventions enforced at authoring. Drift caught faster. Blast radius bounded when something does go wrong.

    40%
    Fewer misconfig-driven incidents
The numbers

ROI in plain math.

Anchored to what you already pay. Procurement gets a familiar reference. Your team gets the savings.

Example environment · 500 Cisco Secure Workload agents · 3 integrated enforcement platforms · SaaS delivery · $180K loaded engineering FTE

  • $226K
    Annual gross savings. ClickOps, reviews, audit, risk combined.
  • $153K
    Annual platform fee. Anchored to what you already pay.
  • 8 mo
    Payback period at steady-state savings.
  • 48%
    Year-1 ROI at steady state.
How it’s priced
  • 01

    Anchored to existing license

    Base pricing is a percentage of your existing platform license. Procurement gets a familiar reference.

  • 02

    Per integration, not per device

    Fifty firewalls under one Panorama costs the same integration fee as five. Sprawl inside a platform isn't billed extra.

  • 03

    Live ROI calculator in scoping

    BTA delivers a working model during the scoping engagement. Change the inputs to match your environment. The numbers update with them.

Talk to a BTA architect to model your numbers
What makes us different

We're architects who execute.

Three principles every BTA engagement runs on. Visible in the work itself.

  • We architect, deploy, and stay through Day-2.

    Every engagement is end-to-end. We design the target environment, deploy it in stages, and remain on hand through the operational handoff.

  • We train your team to own the outcome.

    Training is part of every engagement. By the close of an engagement, your operators can run, maintain, and defend the system to an auditor.

  • We measure success when your team runs it alone.

    An engagement closes when your team is operating the solution without us in the room. SIMPLE methodology enforces this exit criterion on every project.

SIMPLE Methodology
See how SIMPLE works
Engagement models

We meet you where you are.

Some teams want the full BTA delivery from architecture to handoff. Others bring us in for a single advisory window or a fully managed operations contract. Pick the model that fits and adjust as the business changes.

Talk to a specialist
Featured · default

Full Service Lifecycle

Architect, deploy, train, hand off.

The complete BTA engagement. We design the target environment, deploy in stages, and train your operating team along the way. SIMPLE methodology end to end. Your team owns Day-2.

  • SIMPLE methodology
  • 1,000+ projects
  • 0 project failures
  • End-to-end project management
See the full delivery
Or pick a focused engagement format
PAE · FAQ

Policy Automation Engine, answered.

Direct answers to what most evaluators ask before deployment.

  • What is PAE?

    PAE is the automation engine of the AE+PAE management layer. It captures the technical truth of every flow, enriches it with business context, asks the owner to attest in plain language, then pushes policy to every enforcement point. Naming conventions get enforced at authoring. Every state is archived continuously.

  • What enforcement platforms does PAE support?

    PAE pushes policy to Cisco Secure Workload, Cisco ACI, Palo Alto Panorama, Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), major cloud providers, and ServiceNow for change management. Pluggable enforcement points mean adding a new platform is an integration, not a rewrite.

  • Do we need Architect Explorer to use PAE?

    No, but the two work together as one management layer. Architect Explorer is the read-and-author surface. It covers visualization, cross-platform reporting, and the workflow App Owners, Risk, and Audit use to attest policy. PAE is the engine that turns those attestations into policy pushed to every enforcement point. Customers commonly start with PAE on one platform and add AE as their console-hopping cost compounds.

  • Who needs to be involved to get started?

    A typical PAE deployment involves your CISO or network security lead, your compliance or risk officer, and your IT operations team. BTA manages the technical onboarding. Your team participates in a discovery session and signs off at key milestones.

  • How quickly can we become audit-ready?

    Most organizations using PAE compress audit preparation from weeks to hours. Customers have reported compliance sign-off cycles shortening from two months to one day, with audit-grade attestation logs produced as a byproduct of the workflow.

  • Can PAE scale across hybrid and multi-cloud environments?

    Yes. The engine supports enforcement across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures, with the same business-intent layer driving policy across each.

  • How is PAE priced?

    PAE is anchored to your existing platform licenses, priced per integration rather than per device. Fifty firewalls under one Panorama costs the same integration fee as five. Sprawl inside a platform doesn't punish you. BTA delivers a live ROI calculator during scoping so you can model the math against your actual environment.

  • What's the typical payback period?

    Modeled on a representative environment of 500 Cisco Secure Workload agents, three integrated enforcement platforms, SaaS delivery, and a $180K loaded engineering FTE, steady-state payback runs around 8 months with Year-1 ROI near 48%. Your numbers will vary. The scoping engagement produces the live model against your environment.
30 minutes

Schedule a call. We’ll scope it in 30 minutes.

Bring your hardest architecture problem. We’ll tell you what we’d do, what it costs, and how long it takes.

  • 30-minute scoping call
  • 1,000+ projects shipped
  • Training in every engagement

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